


Le Roi

by billspilledquill



Series: the quality of mercy [2]
Category: Le Comte de Monte-Cristo | Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cycle of Revenge, Gen, Madness, Microfic, Untreated Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-09 03:10:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 682
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17993726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/billspilledquill/pseuds/billspilledquill
Summary: Between digging babies and rubbing his eyes full of red-veined dirt, Villefort didn’t gave any preference one over the other.The aftermath of a family affair.





	Le Roi

**Author's Note:**

> I told you to be wary. It’s a series now.  
> Villefort has always been the more sympathetic one out of the three, so here you go.

 

Between digging babies and rubbing his eyes full of red-veined dirt, Villefort didn’t gave any preference one over the other.

He would hear whistles of old friends and new enemies, but his hands were there, digging. Villefort was going to the press and claim to be the first man to dig the earth. He was in the center, burning like woods to a fire.

He can’t go inside. Ghosts were waiting for him inside. He can’t go upstairs. His father was there, his eyes unblinking, all that the blame Villefort couldn’t manage to have when he had sweat tickled down his cheek and red veins throbbing underneath it.

His hands touched something. Pushing his hair out of his face with his black fingers, he found his son covered in blood and mucus, something akin to a bone-saw slashing through the heart.

Villefort sang _La_ _Marseillaise_ and wrapped his arms around the hole where the baby was buried, curled into himself, mumbling something about sons to be sent off to war and enemies to kill.

 

* * *

 

Edmond the pure. Edmond the good. Edmond the sailor.

He can’t remember. It’s hard to remember.

 

* * *

 

“Father, father,” he rushes upstairs anyway, smiling ears to ears. “Father.”

Never called him Father. Say it with me: Monsieur de Villefort, not father. Father didn’t flinch. Father looked at him with disappointed eyes and not much else. 

Father, Father: what do people get when they don’t remember? Peace. Joy. Relief.

Gérard de Villefort was laying his dirty hand on his father and sobbing out brown, thick rivers of mud. I thought I was holding my son, father. My daughter loves you. Why is she not here?

Monsieur de Villefort blinked. He never understood his father’s language til now.

Mad and sick men had a way of understanding each other.

 

* * *

 

Villefort was reading the French law code when the doctor came to fetch him.

Your eyes are dull, he said. Your mouth dry. Do you ever drink?

Villefort stared a little at the doctor’s frenzy mustache, his well-made physique. Everyone lived a life. Edmond sailed to the sea, then never returned.

He grew bored when the doctor poked at his hollowed cheeks and empty stomach; he ate his Code, stuffed it in his mouth, as if to say: to hell with the law, I ate it for dinner.

 

* * *

 

The Count of Monte Cristo visited one last time.

His eyes new and pitiful at everything around him. “Your father went to live in a better place,” the Count said, gesturing at the mess, whatever mess that might be, he or him. 

Villefort was reading the English Code, his legs high up in the air, his head on the ground. “Father is dead,” he said. “You killed him.”

There was something truly disgusting in the Count’s sadness. “He is an innocent. I have no right to condemn him.”

Villefort never went to England. He knew about Aberdeen, Belfast’s Ireland. He knew Bradford and Exeter. The coastline ending somewhere in the sea so many drowned into. He never knew how to kill in England, so he supposed he needed to read its law.

Eat the pages. Think with thick, leather cover. Villefort was a book. An easy one.

“I want to tell you that your daughter is alive,” the Count said.

“I want to tell you that you will go to hell,” he answered.

“One cannot desire what we already have,” the Count said after a pause. “Retribution is near.” 

England once had a king with a cut head. He realized that Villefort did not need to kill to die. He was already, like a king, condemned for being what he was, something so abstract and absurd like expensive paintings on a wall, a symbol of the past that none of them liked, not even himself.

He was in France. He thought about Elba instead, about its clear sky and pointed rocks.

 

* * *

 

A Count’s revenge. A Count’s money. A Count’s Cromwell.

Everybody remembered it for him. It’s easy.

 

* * *

 

Villefort held the dirt like his son. A king announcing his heir.

It had felt like redemption. 

 

 

 


End file.
